Browsing Catharsis – 01.14.13

“What, you didn’t think I would be so crazy as to invoke Pedro there, did you? It’s not like De La Rosa shares the genetic code of the Martinez clan, even if his grandmother was in close proximity to it. However, this does give us some background as to why De La Rosa has chosen to work with Pedro’s brother (and former Red Sox himself), Ramon Martinez, this off-season. De La Rosa’s goal? According to Rob Bradford, it’s ‘to be the best pitcher in MLB.'”

I HAVEN’T GOTTEN ONE YET BUT THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE I DISCOUNT HYPERBOLICALLY.

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SOME SMART THOUGHTS ON THE LATEST CONDESCENDING BULLSHIT CRITICISM OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY.

“Someone named Dan Slater recently wrote a book, Love in the Time of Algorithms, and has an op-ed out titled Darwin Was Wrong About Dating. The piece is littered with generally unpersuasive refutations of the relevance of a Darwinian framework in understanding the evolutionary origins of human behavior. I say this while granting that I have come to find much evolutionary theorizing somewhat shoddy. But that’s true for much of science, and scholarship more generally. It just so happens that evolutionary psychology has social and political relevance, while other fields do not. Wrong science does not negate the importance of an evolutionary framework.”

“In this post, I thought that I’d combine these two, and propose the ‘Pop Anti-Evolutionary Psychology Game.’ Anyone can play, and the rules are only a little bit more complicated. First, assert something that evolutionary psychologists think. These assertions can come in any of a number of flavors, the only requirement being that it has to be something that is obviously false, obviously stupid, or both.”